Imagine a situation: you are hitchhiking on the road. Suddenly a
car stops and a couple inside tells you: “You can get a
ride”. You look closer and see they are your president and
his wife. That’s what happened to one Uruguayan man when he met
Jose Mujica.

"On Monday, I was looking for a ride from Conchinchilla and
guess who picked me up on the road?" Gerhald Acosta wrote on
his Facebook post January 7.

The man told Uruguayan El Observador newspaper on Friday that he
was hurrying home to the city of Juan Lacaz, in southwestern
Uruguay, from the Montes del Plata paper mill where he works.

He had been walking “for a while and around 25 to 30 cars
passed by and nobody stopped.” Then he saw “an SUV
[sport utility vehicle] with government license tags and a car
following it”.

The van stopped and the hitchhiker saw an elderly man and woman
who asked him “what had happened that he needed to ask for a
ride.” The couple was none other than President Jose Mujica
and his wife, Lucia Topolansky, who were en route to the
presidential country residence of Anchorena.

During the short ride, Acosta managed to make a photo of the
presidential couple.

“When I got out, I thanked them profusely, because not
everyone helps someone out on the road, and much less a
president,” he said.

The ride made Acosta a local superstar in his town, since the
photos of Mujica and Topolansky were published by El Observador.

“After it happened, everyone would stop me to ask me about
the president or to tell me something about him.”

Mujica is widely seen as one of the world’s most down-to-earth
leaders, who has often emphasized the need for people to love
each other and not focus on material things.

"A president is a high-level official who is elected to carry
out a function. He is not a king, not a god. He is not the witch
doctor of a tribe who knows everything. He is a civil servant. I
think the ideal way of living is to live like the vast majority
of people whom we attempt to serve and represent," he once
told Al Jazeera.

The former guerrilla lives on a run-down farm, which is under his
wife’s name. The only other prized possession of real material
value he reportedly owns is the 1987 Beetle.

As far as official declarations of wealth go, Mujica earns a
comfortable $11,000 a month, 20 percent of which goes to his
political movement. He reportedly donates most of the rest of his
salary to charities supporting the poor.

Mujica led a radical overhaul of drug policies on cannabis
possession, setting a blueprint for other Latin American
countries. The legalization of cannabis enabled Uruguayan
authorities to combat the neighboring Paraguayan drug trade.